Law & Disorder —

The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on

Remember Gopher? The protocol predated the Web, and a hardy band of …

gopher n. 1. Any of various short tailed, burrowing mammals of the family Geomyidae, of North America. 2. (Amer. colloq.) Native or inhabitant of Minnesota: the Gopher State. 3. (Amer. colloq.) One who runs errands, does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents for office staff. 4. (computer tech.) software following a simple protocol for burrowing through a TCP/IP internet.

-From RFC 1436 describing Gopher

Minnesota is not a proud place—how else to explain the fact that it voluntarily bills itself the "Gopher State" and has as its main university mascot an appallingly bucktoothed rodent known as a "golden gopher"?

So it was no surprise that when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it "gopher." The initial version of the protocol appeared in 1991; by 1993, it had been codified as a Request for Comment (RFC 1436) that laid out the protocol in some detail.

According to the RFC, gopher was designed as a client-server protocol running over TCP/IP. Much lighter than HTTP and HTML, gopher provided essentially two options: menus and documents, both of which were accessed through port 70. The system was initially text-based, though basic image serving ability came later. There was no decorative markup for menu pages, which all looked basically (and boringly) the same; on the other hand, gopher was quick and consistent.

It was also on the way out pretty quickly. I used it in 1994 during my first year in college, but even there it coexisted with HTML (and the new Mosaic "Web browser"). HTML quickly came to dominate, gopher servers migrated onto the Web, and search engines like Google eventually replaced the arcane gopher search engines like Archie, VERONICA, and JUGHEAD (Veronica-2 continues to monitor gopherspace).

Attempts to improve Gopher did little to stop the weaving of the Web. University of Minnesota computer scientists developed the Gopher+ protocol in the summer of 1993 as a way to "summon new capabilities to bridge the most keenly felt shortcomings of the venerable old Gopher."

Gopher+ was backwards compatible with Gopher, but the protocol's popularity was waning, and Gopher+ never took off (it never achieved RFC status, either).

But, like its namesake, Gopher was hard to kill. As late as 2000-2001, backers like Bjorn Karger were writing the "Gopher Manifesto" and arguing that a return to gopher would be a return to the purity of the early Internet.

"No graphic design means its the ideal navigable interface, a hypertext Eden," wrote Karger. "It gives simplified usage for sight-impaired users, same contents for wired/wiredless, and requires no capital investments in layout and 'design.' Gopher is real—and it was fully functional in 1992, even without advertisements!"

This sense of gopher as an Edenic protocol of innocence (in comparison to HTML, the protocol of commerce and experience) gave power to the calls for its resurrection. Karger features a bit of reminiscence from one Lawrence Rhodes, whose description of using the protocol is telling:

"'Point your Gopher to...' I remember getting excited when almost anything followed these words," said Rhodes. "It was a sign of progress. Or of the impending state of information connectedness we all now experience. Now it seems so quaint. I miss it so not for the underpinning technology (which may or may not have been superior) but for the feeling that the world of information technology, indeed the world itself, was advancing rapidly enough to allow the common man access to the world's great storehouses of data. Of course, in retrospect, I suppose if I had thought about the common man's indefatigable hunger for porn and nonstop commerce and the myriad other forms of bad taste, I would have seen the dangers of the banal. Indeed Gopher represented a simpler, more naive time."

This isn't a view shared by all Gopher enthusiasts, though. Cameron Kaiser is a programmer on the Overbite Project, which brings better Gopher support to Firefox versions 2 and 3. When he writes about the relevance of Gopher in a Web world, he rejects the nostalgia for a "simpler time."

"The misconception that the modern renaissance of Gopherspace is simply a reaction to 'Web overload' is unfortunately often repeated and, while superficially true, demonstrates a distinct lack of insight," he writes. Instead, Gopher's advantages lie in the structure that its simple menu-based interface imposes on content.

"Gopher is a mind-set on making structure out of chaos," says Kaiser. "Within Gopherspace, all Gophers work the same way and all Gophers organize themselves around similar menus and interface conceits. It is not only easy and fast to create Gopher content in this structured and organized way, it is mandatory by its nature. Resulting from this mandate is the ability for users to navigate every Gopher installation in the same way they navigated the one they came from, and the next one they will go to. Just like it had been envisioned by its creators, Gopher takes the strict hierarchical nature of a file tree or FTP and turns it into a friendlier format that still gives the fast and predictable responses that they would get by simply browsing their hard drive. As an important consequence, by divorcing interface from information, Gopher sites stand and shine on the strength of their content and not the glitz of their bling."

As is evident from their manifestos, neither Kaiser nor Karger have much time for "design," which always threatens to overshadow "content." Unfortunately for the Gopherphile, Gopherspace has been stripped of much of its content; even the "mother Gopher" at the University of Minnesota has been shuttered.

Gopher tools

Gopher hasn't wholly died, though, and a bit of poking around in Gopher holes shows that Gopher-based tools are still being actively developed. First, though, you'll need some way to browse Gopher servers.

The easiest cross-platform tool is Firefox, which continues to support Gopher browsing. This is not without controversy; a bug request filed back in 2007 wants to "lessen attack vectors by removing Gopher protocol support." Two years later, however, Firefox continues to support the protocol. The Overbite project, not satisfied with this implementation, has written its own Firefox extension to replace the default Gopher support with something more robust.

Standalone, modern gopher clients are tough to come by, but you can download older programs at the HAL 3000 archive.

For the text-mode-inclined, most Telnet clients can display Gopher's basic output, and browsers like Lynx are a perfect match for Gopher's textual nature.

Finally, to play around with Gopher without installing a client, Floodgap Systems runs a free Gopher proxy that renders Gopher pages as HTML files and allows for seamless Gopher browsing.

Or you can throw caution to the wind and browse 4chan, of all things, through Gopher. The notorious /b/ discussion board, home to both the Anonymous movement and the sort of pictures that might send your mother to the hospital, is accessible through Port 70's Gopherchan.

Someone at Floodgap has also built a Twitter browser that can pull any user's tweets into a Gopher page so... there's that, too.

Basically, it's the Web without commercial users, graphic design, Flash video, cookies, and popup windows—and, when put that way, it's possible to see why Gopher's devotees appreciate the stark simplicity of the protocol.

On the other hand, a bit of time spent poking around in Gopherspace offers a powerful reminder that most of the world has moved on, leaving Gopher in its hole.

And for a bit of history -> amongst the many (oh *so* many!) reasons that the Gopher didn't quite take off was the second GopherCon - yes, there were such things - when U Minn. revealed their protocol licensing scheme. It was big, complicated, but about the only really understandable part was you had to pay them to set up a server. Yes, there were all sorts of exemptions and out-clauses, but the bottom line was that the protocol was encumbered. The sense of deflation was almost palpable....

The misplaced nostalgia is frightening. Gopher was fun while it lasted, but WWW was better in every way. It allowed more connectivity and creativity than Gopher. Those rejecting design are insane. There are plenty of ways to keep your design simple yet still nice to look at and easy to navigate. For those misguided nostalgia buffs, apparently they don't remember Gopher nor the early days of WWW. WWW was everything they remember Gopher to be, there was porn on both, and the banal and commercial aspects would have come to any protocol that got widely popular. What they really pine for are the days when only the "technology elite" (as they would consider themselves, natch) were on the internet, ahead of the curve. Now everyone is up to speed, they've lost their lofty perch, and finding that new edge will take more work than they want to exert. Now, being on the internet isn't enough for cred, you have to actually create content for that "internet cred."

Popularity lowers the barrier to entry as I'm sure the folks over at The Well can readily understand.

You think there would still be a place for something like Gopher. The highly structured content-driven system might work better on my cell phone screen than most web pages do (and they would cost a lot less to download then all those images).

In some ways this seems to be the impetuous behind Twitter (or even RSS). Compare it to, say, the Facebook wall. Twitter is content stripped of design. Maybe a Gopher successor could fill a similar role for other types of content.

And if the anti-Net-neutrality people get there way, we might all be stuck using Gopher. It might be the only thing that fits once big media gets their hands on the rest of the bandwidth.

"'Point your Gopher to...' I remember getting excited when almost anything followed these words," said Rhodes. "It was a sign of progress. Or of the impending state of information connectedness we all now experience. Now it seems so quaint. I miss it so not for the underpinning technology (which may or may not have been superior) but for the feeling that the world of information technology, indeed the world itself, was advancing rapidly enough to allow the common man access to the world's great storehouses of data. Of course, in retrospect, I suppose if I had thought about the common man's indefatigable hunger for porn and nonstop commerce and the myriad other forms of bad taste, I would have seen the dangers of the banal. Indeed Gopher represented a simpler, more naive time."

It is a good thing the world has moved on past arrogant douchebags like this guy.

quote:"So it was no surprise that, when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it "gopher.""

In behalf of the creators of the protocol's name, there is a Latin abbreviation, commonly used in "serious" books, articles and papers: "cfr." pronounced "confer," translated as "go to see."It is used as a [paper] hiperlink: you are speaking of something and the author send you to "cfr." (go to see) other material.

Originally posted by lmasanti:quote:"So it was no surprise that, when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it "gopher.""

In behalf of the creators of the protocol's name, there is a Latin abbreviation, commonly used in "serious" books, articles and papers: "cfr." pronounced "confer," translated as "go to see."It is used as a [paper] hiperlink: you are speaking of something and the author send you to "cfr." (go to see) other material.

Originally posted by dieswaytoofast:And for a bit of history -> amongst the many (oh *so* many!) reasons that the Gopher didn't quite take off was the second GopherCon - yes, there were such things - when U Minn. revealed their protocol licensing scheme. It was big, complicated, but about the only really understandable part was you had to pay them to set up a server. Yes, there were all sorts of exemptions and out-clauses, but the bottom line was that the protocol was encumbered. The sense of deflation was almost palpable....

The ironic thing is that Gopher was developed on the side, not by researchers in the computer science department, but by a couple of programmers in the computing services department (in Hypercard of all things). But once it started to take off the higher ups noticed, and quickly tried to figure out how to squeeze it for all it was worth (hence, GopherCon). Problem was, WWW was coming out at the same time, and was superior in at least one way - being able to type in URL's and start anywhere - that Gopher couldn't match.

Originally posted by lmasanti:quote:"So it was no surprise that, when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it "gopher.""

In behalf of the creators of the protocol's name, there is a Latin abbreviation, commonly used in "serious" books, articles and papers: "cfr." pronounced "confer," translated as "go to see."It is used as a [paper] hiperlink: you are speaking of something and the author send you to "cfr." (go to see) other material.

uh, no. It was because of Goldy Gopher.

The popular myth when I was using it was that it was because you would use it to go for information (i.e. you'd Gopher it)

Originally posted by lmasanti:quote:"So it was no surprise that, when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it "gopher.""

In behalf of the creators of the protocol's name, there is a Latin abbreviation, commonly used in "serious" books, articles and papers: "cfr." pronounced "confer," translated as "go to see."It is used as a [paper] hiperlink: you are speaking of something and the author send you to "cfr." (go to see) other material.

uh, no. It was because of Goldy Gopher.

The University of Minnesota mascot. It's not for nothing that the other Big Ten schools, when they had Gopher servers, actually named them after other animals.

Originally posted by aquasub:It is a good thing the world has moved on past arrogant douchebags like this guy.

And now if only the world would move past pointless childish namecalling.

I think the subtext of his statement is that he is disheartened that the dissemination of information has moved from a more academic role to a commercial one. While he may have chosen borderline hyperbolic statements regarding the "common man," it doesn't mean it's an entirely inaccurate depiction. Access to and aggregation of information are becoming more commercialised.

To make a slightly absurd analogy: I come to Ars Technica for articles such as John Siracusa's Mac OS X reviews/insights, Jon Stokes' insights and Peter Bright's occasional Windows reviews/insights. This, coupled with the fact that the comments rarely digress into a "FIRST" and "+1"/"++" nature, is the reason why I remain here. However, with the ever increasing invasiveness of the ads -- the fly-out or the full screen ads that have become more and more prevalent -- it certainly detracts from the core reasons I have enjoyed the site over the years.

In keeping with my analogy, I interpreted his statement as being disheartened that the quality of information to advertising/PR ratio is tipping in favour of advertising.

Originally posted by mikepaul:Geeze, I'm getting paranoid. All I could think of is terrorists using this for communication since it's so... underground...

Not that I want to give them any ideas, but if there was an internet relic that would seem tailor made for them, it would be Hotline. At least based on what I remember of it. In fact, the Wiki on it says that the company went under after the venture capital funds pulled out after 9/11.

In case the spam is deleted, I thought I'd quote the above for posterity. The look of the price-list made me wonder for a minute if someone had copied and pasted a page from a store on a gopher server.

Originally posted by TheSpike:Problem was, WWW was coming out at the same time, and was superior in at least one way - being able to type in URL's and start anywhere - that Gopher couldn't match.

Apparently that's fixed since the gopher links in the article worked fine for me in Firefox. I guess you were referring to old standalone gopher clients?

Anyway, I like it, but then again I always liked FTP. Gopher just seems slightly prettier, or more navigable at least. Sure HTTP is awesome in some ways, but I'm getting awfully sick of trying to find game or movie info and learning that the only source is the publisher's flash-intro-laden website with "xtreme" background music and whooshing flyout menus.

Originally posted by TheSpike:Problem was, WWW was coming out at the same time, and was superior in at least one way - being able to type in URL's and start anywhere - that Gopher couldn't match.

Apparently that's fixed since the gopher links in the article worked fine for me in Firefox. I guess you were referring to old standalone gopher clients?

I was. The old gopher network was pretty much hardwired - I recall having to navigate to big gopher home pages to find things. It wasn't bad for what it was, but it was highly centralized, and not particularly open. To put it another way, it was developed on campus before all students were automatically given email accounts, and before the dorms were wired for net access.

Originally posted by mikepaul:Geeze, I'm getting paranoid. All I could think of is terrorists using this for communication since it's so... underground...

Not that I want to give them any ideas, but if there was an internet relic that would seem tailor made for them, it would be Hotline. At least based on what I remember of it. In fact, the Wiki on it says that the company went under after the venture capital funds pulled out after 9/11.

Hotline development continued until 2003 after HostSprings bought the rights from Hotline Communications.

As for the terrorism network stuff - yeah it's possible - but not very effective. They'd have to maintain a running hotline server instance. And who knows hwat modern network protocols are in place that would hinder the usability of somehting that hasn't been kept up with for 6-7 years.

Just found a copy of a Client and installed it - launched it - tried to access some old servers. Nothing - all seem to be down. But it was also throwing up some Errors. So unless these 'would-be' terrorists spend some time and energy grabbing the source code and updating the software to to fix the Errors and modernize the code - they're probably better off with an SSL or VNC connection. Much easier to deal with. And a hell of a lot more secure.

quote:

I was. The old gopher network was pretty much hardwired - I recall having to navigate to big gopher home pages to find things. It wasn't bad for what it was, but it was highly centralized, and not particularly open. To put it another way, it was developed on campus before all students were automatically given email accounts, and before the dorms were wired for net access.

That reminds me of the old Prodigy - AOL - CompuServe Stand-alone Community Hubs on dial up in the late 80s early 90s.

"a bug request filed back in 2007 wants to "lessen attack vectors by removing Gopher protocol support." "And indeed IE did exactly this back in 2002. Actually, they at first didn't completely remove it, but just disable it, but I think IE 7 completely removed it.

Originally posted by mikepaul:Geeze, I'm getting paranoid. All I could think of is terrorists using this for communication since it's so... underground...

Not that I want to give them any ideas, but if there was an internet relic that would seem tailor made for them, it would be Hotline. At least based on what I remember of it. In fact, the Wiki on it says that the company went under after the venture capital funds pulled out after 9/11.

Just because HTTP (and HTML) can handle images, video, and Flash, doesn't mean you have to use them. If you are against such things, just point Apache at a directory of files and away you go. I don't understand the need for the throwback.

Originally posted by fferitt25:So unless these 'would-be' terrorists spend some time and energy grabbing the source code and updating the software to to fix the Errors and modernize the code - they're probably better off with an SSL or VNC connection. Much easier to deal with. And a hell of a lot more secure.

Or perhaps an SSH-accessible BBS server, loaded with the latest jihadist door games.

It was kind of odd that you quote Cameron Kaiser extensively in the piece, but refer to "someone at Floodgap." Cameron Kaiser is the sole person behind Floodgap, as the first line of text at Floodgap.com indicates:

"My name is Cameron Kaiser…"

Beyond that, I do wish the tone at the end were a bit less dismissive.

Gopher was a very nice, organized step forward from the trackless wastes of ftp servers that came before it. But it was clear from the first time I fired up Mosaic that the web was the real destination, with gopher only a step, albeit an important one, along the way.

I don't know. I think Gopher could still be somewhat useful nowadays. It'd make a good starting point for a "universal" content system. The internet is well and good, but it'd be awesome to have something like a "library computer protocol" that you would have this hierarchical organization of information that can be easily displayed in a plaintext (with simple image) format, which could then be styled by the user using a variation of CSS. That way the content is in a somewhat universally portable system.

Again this may be a specialized case...but I can see something appealing about that.